Along This Trail
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Romanticized Oyaji Gyagu (Dad Jokes)
In Japanese, there is a term called oyaji gyagu (おやじギャグ), literally “dad jokes”—the kind of puns that are so corny they make everyone around you groan. They are often built on wordplay, loose associations, or accidental similarities in sound. Last night, while scrolling through YouTube Shorts before bed, I came across a clip of a…
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Aspect and Tense in Japanese
In my previous job as an AI content analyst, I once came across the sentence: 「過去には以下のようなイベントが開催されています。」 To me, it sounded somewhat unnatural, although many others seemed to find it acceptable. Wanting to understand the issue more clearly, I spent several hours discussing the linguistic nuances and complications of the sentence with ChatGPT in Japanese. By…